


chiaroscuro

by toujours_nigel



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M, Nude Modeling, Nude Photos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-10
Updated: 2020-10-10
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:46:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26924566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/toujours_nigel/pseuds/toujours_nigel
Summary: Laid end to end and strung together, Nicky’s made a living as an artist’s model for about a century, give or take a year. So he has no excuse, really for feeling like his heart’s going to hammer its way out of his ribcage when he unlocks his phone in the middle of a bakery in Horlivka and finds the photo Joe has sent him.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Nicky | Nicolo di Genova & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 8
Kudos: 221





	chiaroscuro

Laid end to end and strung together, Nicky’s made a living as an artist’s model for about a century, give or take a year. All of them have, really, but Andy only enjoys it when she’s a muse and not a working model, and Quynh used to tire faster than Joe of the exotic poses into which she was contorted. They’d stopped it, more or less, by the time they collected Booker, still rubbed raw from losing Quynh: it wasn’t as much fun, without her cheerful asides and threats to start Nicky in on a different exercise regime.

“Chao chi,” Nicky had pouted, “it isn’t me, this man just paints in this way.”

She had clucked her tongue and leaned in to pinch at his flank, twist a bit of skin between her fingers. “After we come back, you’re waking up at dawn with me for the next decade. You’ve gone pale and I don’t like it.”

Quynh had been pale herself, like mutton-fat jade, the veins shining blue in her hands and wrists, but Joe had nodded, clamped a hand tight on Nicky’s mouth when he started to complain.

She hadn’t come back. They’d had to travel themselves in search of Andy for months, and afterwards she was two years in Joe’s care while Nicky worked to keep them going. They had set up house in Savona and could have sold what they had: gold and silver, iron and brass old enough to be precious to collectors, manuscripts from poets and doctors Joe had befriended over the years. But Nicky liked the work: the clean ache in his muscles from a day of masonry or hauling loads, the easy companionship of labour, the ways in which the language he had spoken as a child sounded six centuries later. He liked also the weight of Joe’s gaze on him when he came into their home robed in dust and sluiced off in the courtyard, and of his hands later, disrobing Nicky and laying him in their bed, kissing the curves of muscle, the skin stretched over the drum of his ribs. 

He had thought, after they’d brought the wreck of her lover home, of tattooing Quynh’s last touch, an arrowhead between his ninth and tenth ribs, but ink didn’t regenerate with skin. In the second year Joe had disappeared for three months, and returned with a sketch of Quynh he had stolen from the grandchildren of an artist who had fifty years before tucked her into a corner of a gilded harem: Quynh had lifted her lip at the finished painting, but it had kept them in wine for a week. Andy looked at it and turned her face away, but Nicky crept up on her a week later, cradled in Joe’s arms, finally weeping. 

Five years after that she had taken off on her own, lived out a full mortal life alone, became some man’s wife and then left him. She came back to them only after they started dreaming of Booker, slammed into Nicky in some student’s garrett with all four limbs clinging to him: the best gambeson he had ever worn, flesh and blood and breathing, hearts beating timeless time. When they parted the children were staring like startled deer without the sense to run, and Andy laughed when the boldest offered Nicky his shirt back.

“I thought you’d stopped doing this,” she said while Nicky dragged on his clothes.

“I got bored,” he told her. “Joe spends half his waking hours with the medical students and a third more with the printers. Besides, they’re paying me in sketches.”

Joe had been collecting them already for centuries as he collected manuscripts: traces of his friends, of their family. Nicky’s he put to an use to which he did not subject Andy’s or Quynh’s. He added some of Booker to the pile, scribbled out by Nicky or Andy on bored days waiting for Paris to erupt into protests and riot, but it was only once he’d struck up a friendship with Louis Daguerre that things got out of hand. By the time Nile sits him down and digitises the lot, Nicky’s grown accustomed to Joe’s keepsakes box being big enough to sleep on: difficult enough to haul up into the back of trucks or out into safehouses that he aches afterwards and Joe showers him with apologetic gratitude.

So he has no excuse, really for feeling like his heart’s going to hammer its way out of his ribcage when he unlocks his phone in the middle of a bakery in Horlivka and finds that the photo Joe has sent him isn’t another in a series of shots of Nile wandering around the Art Museum and haranguing Andy. Instead it is Joe alone, in their hotel room with the curtains drawn, and only a bit of him, at that: the crease of his hip folding up into a raised thigh, the curve of the heel of his hand disappearing into his shadowed lap. He would almost think Joe sent it by mistake, a joke to offer upto Nile’s laughter, but every line in the photo is crisp: golden and lovely. He can see the serrated edge of the birthmark wrapped around Joe’s hip, the starkness of his pubic hair traversing his thigh, the jut of his wrist and the lightly-furred fold of his belly pouching into his groin. If that is an accident, it is of the sort that saw him die and revive a dozen times in Joe’s arms in the bloodied filth of the battlefield where they found each other. Nicky drinks it in till the screen goes dark.

The phone pings again while he’s still staring at the lockscreen: Nile and Joe hanging off a longsuffering Andy, and Nicky holds it close to his chest like a winning hand in cards, peers surreptitiously at the teenagers and retirees buying medovyk and chocolate salami in the middle of the day. He pays for his boxes of khrushtyky and baklava and finds a corner of the street before he thumbs his phone open again, tabs over to his chat with Joe. If the previous photo was a tease, this is, ah, this is one of the pornographic films he and Booker used to watch a few decades ago in grotty little movie theatres in London and crowded flats in Berlin. Nicky isn’t certain it is legal in this country, at this time, for him to stand with his shoulders against granite and blood flooding his face, staring at a photo on his screen of his beloved, staring back at the camera with his eyes half-closed and his eyelashes casting deep shadows. Joe is love-limned, gorgeous, the long line of his spine curved like his scimitar, one arm slung around his raised knees and the other hand tucked into his lap. His hand, Nicky thinks wildly, has moved from its position in the last photo, and flicks back and forth, checking. Yes, definitely a change of position, and not accidental, considering Joe’s deep, dimpled smile.

The phone pings again, this time not a photo. Nicky tries to be grateful, for the sake of his overworked heart and the awkward confusion of dying and reviving on a mildly busy mid-afternoon street. Instead, Joe writes

_ Nile taught me a new skill. Come show your appreciation. _


End file.
